When digitizing a medium (paper or film) of low contrast containing alphanumeric characters, quite often the resulting output consists of weak or broken characters. For example, when a document written in light pencil is scanned and digitized, the resulting image may contain broken characters. If the digital signal from the scanner is sent to a processing device such as an optical character recognition (OCR) machine where connectivity of characters is essential to performance, the machine will not be able to perform adequately. The same problem arises when scanning a document printed by a dot matrix printer, where the dots are not connected.